


An Empty Campsite

by lwise2019



Category: Monster Hunter International Series - Larry Correia
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:08:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27998034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lwise2019/pseuds/lwise2019
Summary: This is how I imagine how the team finds that Ray (i.e., Earl) has become a werewolf.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	An Empty Campsite

_May, 1925_

Billy — William Brown — studied the camp without dismounting. Distantly he wondered how many camps like this he had seen over the decades: bedroll and gear shredded, campfire scattered, and the man — missing. His horse whickered, shaking her head, and he turned to see Frank Smith approaching with his two dogs.

Frank shook his head. "No trail. That rain last night washed it out." No surprise there really. Billy swung down, approached the camp thoughtfully. 

_Everything_ was shredded, scattered, sodden and — there, he saw the glint of metal. Carefully pushing aside a torn shirt, he uncovered a pistol which he knew as well as his own. He lifted it, checked it: fully loaded. It hadn't been fired. In short order he located the other two pistols, the rifle, and the shotgun, all fully loaded. The man hadn't got off a single shot in the attack and his hunting knife was still in its sheath. There was no trace of his body, but the bedclothes bore several brown stains that Billy knew only too well.

Looking around, he found the broken branch where the horse had been tied. She'd evidently taken alarm and shied hard enough to break it, fleeing until she eventually turned up at John Williams' ranch. He'd brought her to town that morning, seeking the owner, and Billy had known her immediately. From her general condition, they thought she'd wandered for several days and, deeply anxious, they'd come searching. And found this.

He'd lost men before, all too many men over the course of over three decades of hunting monsters, but this was different, and not just because the man was his boss, his mentor's son. Why had Ray insisted on camping out by himself this past week instead of staying with the other men in town? He'd been so irritable for a couple of weeks that it had been something of a relief to have him out of their way but … 

Billy should have pressed him more for what was bothering him, should have tried harder to persuade him not to go off alone. They'd _known_ there were dangers; there were always dangers in the wild places of the world. They'd been resting up after a troll hunt and expecting another mission any day, but that had been no reason to relax their vigilance. And yet Ray was an experienced Hunter; he'd been doing it since he was big enough to fire a rifle. If anyone could camp safely in this desert, it was Ray.

Billy's thoughts were interrupted by George Miller, who'd been prowling around looking for tracks but had now stopped, staring off to the southwest. "Billy, look over there. Vultures circling. About … three, four miles, I reckon."

Turning, Billy frowned, squinted, looked again. Age had caught up with him, as it did with everyone, and he just couldn't see at distances like young George. "Mount up, then," he ordered. "We'll look for any trail as we go but, well, that looks like our best bet right now." He didn't have to say that he expected to find their boss's corpse.

* * *

What they found was far worse.

The body which had attracted the vultures lay before the door, torn almost limb from limb. This man had had a chance to fire his pistol several times, and drawn blood too, as there was a large splash of blood and, Billy thought, brains against the well from which the family had drawn its water. The pistol had somehow gotten kicked and knocked away from him and lay near the well. They actually had to study what remained of the face for several moments before concluding that it was not, in fact, Ray.

The three men looked at the body, the wide-open door, and each other. There was no choice, really. Frank ordered the dogs to "stay" and, pistols drawn and ready, they stepped over the pitiful remains and into the house.

Younger and less experienced than the others, George at least knew to get out of the scene before losing his lunch. He only saw the first two bodies before bolting for the door. Billy and Frank kept going, grimly. They were fairly sure that there were four bodies in the house: a woman, a boy, two young children too ravaged for further identification. All of the bodies were partial, as the attacker or attackers had clearly dined on them. From the smell, the slaughter had occurred days earlier.

Carefully searching the farmhouse, they found no threats; the attacker or attackers had departed, but they had not avoided leaving a trace here: in several places the Hunters found immense pawprints in the blood.

The two older Hunters left the house not quite at a run, being careful not to tread on the first victim. "Werewolf," Billy told George flatly when he joined them, still pale with horror.

"We've heard nothing from the locals about that," Frank said, puzzled. "If there's a werewolf about, wouldn't someone have told us? Even if they couldn't pay."

"Passing through?" George ventured. "Those two last month were tramps … you don't think the one that got away … that she followed us …?"

> They hadn't been hired to hunt werewolves. Giant spiders in a quarry, yes, werewolves, no. When they found the bodies though … well, Hunters hunt. It's what they do.
> 
> There were six of them on that hunt, Ray, Billy, Frank, Frank's brother Jim, Joe Moore, and George. Tracking the creatures to a tumbledown shack, they launched their attack during the day, when they thought the things would be at their weakest. They brought down the first one with a fast six-way fusillade of lead as it began its transformation.
> 
> But it tore out Jim's throat before it went down.
> 
> Frank fell to his knees with a cry beside his brother, but still managed to get off a shot at the second monster as it charged at Ray, its slavering jaws wide for another killing bite. After that the werewolf and Ray were too close together for anyone to risk a shot.
> 
> Ray got his left arm up to block the bite, going down under the beast's weight, but still firing repeatedly into its belly with the pistol in his right hand. Hurting and weakened, but not down for the count, the werewolf released him and fled snarling into the woods.
> 
> Billy and George rushed to help Ray, whose blood was flowing freely from his arm. They carried bandages, of course, all Hunters did, and fairly quickly they had the wound tightly bandaged and the injured man on his horse. There was nothing anyone could do for Jim but load up the body to take him home for the funeral.
> 
> The first werewolf reverted to human form, and when the corpse was hauled into town, the locals recognized him as a tramp who'd been hanging about the town with his wife — or so she'd claimed to be. There'd been petty thefts that couldn't quite be pinned on the tramps, and then the murders. The Hunters supposed that the second werewolf had been the wife but she was gone without a trace.
> 
> Life went on. George grieved, but he was responsible now for his own two children and his brother's five, along with his wife and his brother's widow. Ray, Billy, and Frank had wives and children as well, Joe had a widowed mother, and the company was supporting widows and orphans of Hunters killed over the prior decades. They all had to keep working, to keep Hunting, and they did.

"I don't see how she could," Billy answered, frowning. "Weeks ago and hundreds of miles away, all the way back in Arkansas …"

"Another werewolf?" Frank asked angrily, " Where're they coming from? We've never had werewolves before. They're from over _there_ — them English guys have them. Not us!"

"It's the War," George answered grimly. His brother Jim had served in France. "All those eurypean things came over here after the War. We should've just stayed out of it. Like old George told us, 'avoid foreign entanglements.'"

"Hey, Billy," Frank put in, "the dogs have something." They all looked at the dogs which, though still staying in place as ordered, were straining to sniff at the ground over by the well.

"Let them follow," Billy instructed, and at a signal from Frank both dogs had their noses to the ground and were racing toward the pole barn fifty yards from the house. The men followed, handguns ready.

The barn door stood wide open and the dogs had stopped, milling around in confusion. The men had no trouble seeing what had happened: an oil stain on the ground, tools hung on walls — the farm family had had a motor vehicle, a Ford Model T of course, and the werewolf, transformed back to human shape, had stolen it.

"Mount!" Billy ordered. "He — or she — hasn't been gone long. Maybe we can catch him! The Ford might break down …"

Even as they ran for the horses, George asked in confusion, "But — how do you know …?"

"Vultures," Frank put in. "They haven't gotten started in on that man yet. The werewolf must have been hanging around and he _just_ left!"

But the Ford did not break down and they did not catch up. It was not for another day that Sheriff Wilkins found it in a gully near the train tracks. "We won't catch him now," he told Billy bitterly. "The train slows down coming around that turn. Bums jump on and off right over there. We've caught them before. He's riding the rails, gone to Chicago, I reckon. I could send word up there but — well, what's the point? I can't describe him anyway."

The Monster Hunters turned away. They wanted revenge … oh, they wanted revenge for Ray. His body was certainly out there in the desert somewhere, hidden probably, maybe as a cache in case the werewolf didn't find better pickings elsewhere, but they had searched for miles around the ravaged campsite and the dogs hadn't had a sniff of him.

The Hunters wanted revenge for the family too. They worked for pay, of course, everyone had to eat, but monsters were the enemy of mankind, and the Hunters wanted to _kill_ them. Especially monsters that killed children.

The feeling of helplessness ate at them, but after three days of fruitless searching, they had to give up and return to Cazador to tell Helen her oldest son was dead, and Ruth that she was a widow. Worse, they hadn't even brought back a body and they had to hold a memorial service instead of a funeral.

Little Ray, Ray's son, came dry-eyed to Billy after the service. "I'm going to be a Hunter," he stated flatly. "I'll be good at it." That was true; the boy could already shoot and ride, but he was still only five.

As the oldest of the Hunters still working, Billy would be running things until Little Ray was old enough to take over. He tousled the boy's hair and agreed. "You'll be good. But it'll be years before you can join us, and in the meantime you need to study. Study _hard_. You look for what anybody knows about werewolves. There's gotta be a way to find them. But, boy," his voice went softer and kinder, "I don't think we'll ever know if we got the one that killed your pa."

"Then we'll just kill them all," the Hunter-to-be answered grimly.

* * *

_December, 1930_

Billy had learned of the stock market crash on returning to the hotel after a long, hard, hot, day of slaughtering zombies in New Orleans. A witch doctor had had the bright idea of taking over the local bootleggers with zombies as his enforcers. Billy had no objection to bootleggers and was happy to take their money (and their best whiskey) in return for dealing with the problem. That the Federal government would pay him bounties for removing obstacles in the path of the bootleggers was just another source of delight.

But the stock market had "crashed", people were saying as the weary Hunters returned. At first that didn't seem to affect them; all the money the company made went to salaries, pensions, and what came in later decades to be called "infrastructure": the compound that was ever improving outside of Cazador. Billy himself had never trusted the stock market as it seemed like Yankee gambling to him. You put money in and somehow, without doing anything, your money turned into much more. If you took it out. But, like so many gamblers, investors in the stock market liked to let it ride, and so in October of the year of Our Lord 1929, a lot of them lost everything.

Soon enough, a trickle of retired Hunters, and Hunters who'd been independent or working with smaller companies, were coming to Cazador for help, their investments lost and their futures dire. For the first time since old Bubba Shackleford had started the Monster Hunters, they actually had more Hunters than they knew what to do with, and even with Ruth's help, Billy had a hard time keeping track and getting them assigned to the requests that came in.

Over the years they'd had to turn down many requests for help, just because they didn't have the manpower to help everyone. Now, though, they could send a team, but there was no guarantee that the town or company or family that begged for aid could actually pay them. The company was ever more reliant on PUFF bounties to cover expenses: the Federal government _always_ had money.

As a result, Billy was so busy that it took him three weeks to get to the bundle sent to him from Oxford University.

* * *

Billy stood at the window of his study, gazing silently into the darkness and occasionally remembering to puff at his evening cigar. His evening shot of whiskey sat untouched on the desk next to the bottle. He was considering just drinking from the bottle, no need to bother with the glass. Beside the bottle lay the book from Oxford, a book entitled, _On the nature and history of the lycanthrope, called the werewolf by the vulgar populace_. He had only gotten a few pages into it.

The one saving grace of all of this, he thought mournfully, was that Helen had passed away in January. Pneumonia was beyond the power of medicine and the patient got better … or didn't. She hadn't. So she didn't have to know what her son had done. What her son had _become_.

Or maybe she did know, he considered. Wouldn't she know, being on the other side? She belonged in Heaven, he was certain of that, and would she in that blessed state know and be troubled by her son's monstrous acts? Contemplating the nature of heavenly knowledge distracted him for a long time.

He was drawn back to his present problems by footsteps in the hallway. Quickly though arthritically he made it to the desk, closed the book, and pushed it into a drawer as Little Ray — just Ray as they called him now — knocked at the door. "Come in," he answered, composing his face. 

The boy was still growing. He was nearly as tall as Billy now and filling out, and had proven himself in Hunts over the past four months, but even so he didn't need to know the truth. Maybe in a few years. Maybe never. In the past year Billy's teams had killed three werewolves and other companies had reported killing half a dozen more. His own teams would have recognized their man's face, if one of the werewolves had reverted to his form after death, but nobody from the other companies would have. Maybe he was already dead.

Or maybe he was still out there, killing more innocents.

_July, 1935_

Billy had to admit that he was slowing down. The last Hunt had _almost_ gone badly. If Ray hadn't stepped in front of him, taken the shot that he'd missed, the giant spider would've gotten him. He knew how the victims of giant spiders died.

Ruth had welcomed them home with an Independence Day feast. Riding back to his own empty house, he was glad that he hadn't driven the Model A. A horse will take you home no matter how much you've drunk.

The mare shied as someone stepped out of the woods by the road and caught her bridle.

" _Ray_ …" he breathed. He reached for his pistol — not loaded with silver, and not enough bullets to kill a werewolf, but he'd go down fighting. Ray — his boss Ray — didn't move as he aimed. The mare rolled her eyes in terror, but was unable to pull away from the steely grip.

"I've come home."

"You're a monster. You killed children."

"I did. The curse … I've tried to atone. You've heard of the Hunter down in South America? That took out a Master Vampire? That was me, Billy. I've … tried. And I've come home to help you."

The handgun was steady in his hand, aimed directly at the man's forehead, but he couldn't quite pull the trigger. Not when the younger man stood waiting for his judgement.

"I bought the old family place." Ruth had had to let that go to the bank years earlier as the Depression bit deeper. "I've been here three months now. I've been able to … to lock myself away during the full moon. You know there have been no attacks here, you _know_ it. I haven't killed an innocent in five years. I've tried to atone and … I've come home, Billy."

His hand was steady, his aim true. "Ruth and Little Ray don't know. I never told them."

Ray grimaced. "Ruth — I can never be … _with_ her again. The curse —" He looked away. "Thank you for sparing her that."

"Ray would have to know. And Ruth — we'd have to tell her _something_."

"I've thought on that. I think — I don't want to hurt her but telling her the truth would hurt more." He looked Billy in the eye. "Tell her I ran away with a woman. Tell her I broke her heart by pretending to be dead. Tell her to hate me. Tell her I'm broke and I came crawling back to you." He looked away again. "Tell her I can't face her, that I'm ashamed. You won't be lying."

Billy lowered the pistol slowly.


End file.
